ART& nature
Florence Griswold museum examines ‘the naturalist impulse in American art’
When Jenny Parsons interviewed for the job as assistant curator at the Florence Griswold Museum in January 2016, she was struck in particular by a piece that the museum owns: the naturalist collection cabinet of eminent Impressionist Willard Metcalf.
Metcalf was, after all, an amateur naturalist in addition to being an artist, and this mahogany chest showcases butterflies, moths, bird eggs and nests he had amassed, along with related documents.
Metcalf accumulated many of these specimens while spending his summers of 1905 through 1907 in Old Lyme at Florence Griswold’s boarding house. But he found some of them, too, when he travelled to France, where he met Claude Monet in Giverny.
When museum curator Amy Kurtz Lansing showed her the cabinet, Parsons says, “I recognized how special it was.”
While she knew the cabinet had previously been featured in a Flo Gris exhibition, Parsons says, “I just thought it deserved to be shown again. There was such an important, larger story to be told around the cabinet.”
And now she’s telling that story. Parsons was hired and started working at the Flo Gris in May 2016, and she curated the exhibition she envisioned around the Metcalf cabinet. It’s called “Flora/Fauna: The Naturalist Impulse in American Art,” and it runs through Sept. 17 at the Old Lyme venue.
Parsons notes that the oldest examples documented in the cabinet are from the 1880s, when Metcalf traveled to Giverny.
“He was one of the first American artists to meet Claude Monet. Just thinking about how he collected those eggs at Giverny and what it would have taken for him to preserve them and bring them back across the ocean, that they’ve survived all this time, is just so remarkable,” Parsons says. “Even the idiosyncratic way which he’s preserved them — they’re all in these tiny pink cigarette boxes, which seem kind of funny to us and even horrifying to think about these hundreds of cigarette boxes, how many cigarettes he smoked. But it was also thought that tobacco was — I’m not sure if this is still a theory — but it was thought then that tobacco was a preservative property. So probably it wasn’t just happenstance or convenience but maybe the thought of tobacco being this kind of ideal container.”
Henriette Metcalf, who had been married to Willard Metcalf, gifted the cabinet to the museum in 1971, and the Flo Gris now has the largest collection of Metcalf’s work in the world.
Metcalf’s cabinet consists of 28 drawers, and Parsons says that each of them has a different surprise and a different tale to tell.
“That we can look at a collection of natural history and learn so much about art history is also really special because we look at (Metcalf’s) scientific notations and the dates, and we can track his movements, what he was doing, and it helps us also to think about his art career, even though this was his scientific interest,” Parsons says.
Parsons says that she learned how many other artists who visited Old Lyme had scientific interests similar to Metcalf’s. It’s expected, of course, that Impressionists creating nature scenes en plein air would be engrossed in that world. But, for many of them, it was about more than just painting. The artists were often bird watchers or hunters or were intrigued by geology.
“It becomes evident that it was really a more holistic approach to understanding nature and the environment in general,” Parsons says. She adds that painters were also concerned “with wanting to preserve nature — especially with the rise of industrialization in the 19th century … Artists weren’t only going to art colonies just to get away from the cities but also (because) they had other reasons for looking at nature that really informed their art.”
The “Flora/Fauna” exhibition reflects all that and more. One element it explores: Back when America
was new, one of the ways of identifying what the country was, was to determine what flora and fauna existed here and how they differed from those in Europe. Bringing back a drawing or a specimen from the wild had more of an impact and helped raise awareness about exactly what creatures and plants lived here, Parsons says. So scientists and scholars began inviting artists on expeditions to make sketches and illustrations.
The Florence Griswold Museum exhibition includes paintings by such pioneers in the field as Mark Catesby, whose work was in the first published account of America’s flora and fauna, and William Bartram, who created the environmental literature classic “Travels” and whose father, John, created one of the country’s first botanical gardens.
John James Audubon is represented, of course. His 1834 “Brown-headed Worm eating Warbler,” from “The Birds of America” first edition boasts a background painted by Maria Martin, who created a lot of the botanicals and insects for Audubon. The exhibition text notes, “Martin was a skilled amateur botanist and painter but Audubon taught her how to set up ornithological specimens from which to work and to experiment with different techniques.
Featured, too, is “Meadowlarks, Cowbirds,” circa 1990 by Roger Tory Peterson, the renowned ornithologist and artist who lived in Old Lyme and created 53 bird guides.
The exhibition touches on the push-pull between nature and industrialization. David Johnson’s “View near Greenwich, Connecticut,” painted in 1878, is a tranquil portrait of anglers fishing on a quiet pond, but a train chugs by in the distance, looming as if it symbolizes a big change that’s coming. “Perhaps Johnson predicted the sad fate of the local fishing industry, which would be diminished by the railroad that tarnished the peaceful experience of the environment,” the exhibition text states.
One favorite of visitors so far has been Genevieve Jones’ book “Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio,” according to Parsons.
“The illustrations are just amazing,” she says. “They really have kind of a pre-Raphaelite quality in how meticulous they are, how naturalistic they are. Every page is so beautiful, but it is also a tragic story because she started working, figured out her process, and then, after five plates, she contracted typhoid fever and passed away.”
Jones had finished just five of the illustrations for her book when she died, but her family recognized the importance of Genevieve’s work and stepped in to finish her project.
Ultimately, “Flora/Fauna” tells both a national and a local story. Of the 101 works on view, 60 are from the Florence Griswold Museum’s collection.
“It shows that the naturalist impulse is a theme that has always existed here at this art colony and also within the collection,” Parsons says. “That the exhibition brings forth and provides a larger context that can connect out onto the national story I think is really special.”
Not only that, but “Flora/ Fauna” is also relevant to the current day.
“This exhibition is a timely endeavor as we think about our role on this fragile planet, and what we leave for future generations,” the exhibition wall text states. “Works in the exhibition reveal how artistic production has corresponded with social developments in American history, from an early concern with establishing a national identity distinct from Europe; to reflecting Americans’ shifting philosophies on evolution and the human relationship to the environment; to the growth of the conservation movement in the United States.”
Parsons says, “It’s always been a concern in this country. It was something the artists recognized from the beginning, that the American wilderness was something special and unique to America and something that made this country American, distinct from Europe, and it’s something we should continue to cherish and protect.”